Cures for Heartbreak Read Online Free Page A

gold-embossed guestbook, the Hebrew prayer cards—all of it tucked into the Schwartz Memorial Chapel bag, like party favors.
    The candle was still burning. The instruction booklet it came with said not to blow it out, that it would last for seven days to represent the formal mourning period. I’d been blowing it out at night anyway because I was afraid of burning down the house. And secretly I wanted it to last longer.
    My father kept staring at the candle. He’d never been exactly euphoric over the idea of religion. He’d repeat “Religion Is the Cause of All the World’s Ills” as often as “Don’t Throw Out the Milk Without Letting Your Father Sniff It First.” His idea of marking Yom Kippur was to eat smoked kippers. My mother wasn’t too fond of religion either—she and her best friend, Fanny, used to tell the story of how a Catholic friend in elementary school once suggested: “Let’s go to your church and then to mine!” The Catholic churchhad been filled with flowers, singing, smiling . . . and then they went on to my mother and Fanny’s Orthodox synagogue, crowded with all the other German Jewish refugee families in Washington Heights who’d narrowly escaped the Holocaust. My mother had been a baby when she and her parents fled Berlin in 1939, on one of the last boats America let in; Fanny’s family had come from Amsterdam. That day in the synagogue, the girls had to sit upstairs in the cold darkness, enduring the musty smell, listening to the solemn Hebrew words—they giggled until they got asked to leave.
    Because of my parents’ profound distaste for going to synagogue, and rarely taking me to one, my notion of the Jewish religion mainly revolved around food. Rosh Hashanah: apples and honey cake, for a sweet New Year. Yom Kippur: instead of the customary fasting to atone for your sins, we atoned with smoked fish in all its glorious variations, from the aforementioned kippers to sable to lox to whitefish to herring. Chanukah, the festival of lights and fried foods: latkes glistening with oil, applesauce and sour cream on the side. Passover: matzo sandwiches, matzo brei, and matzo ball soup to commemorate our ancestors’ quick exodus from Egypt (no time for the bread to rise). According to Alex, our culinary version of Judaism meant we weren’t Jewish at all. I maintained we were, though I wondered privately if she was right.
    My father adjusted his glasses and leaned against the door. “You’ll enjoy being back at school.”
    I pictured my teachers, lined up like the cast of The Addams Family, their ghoulish faces cackling—Mrs. Petrosky, the sadistic Russian physicist; Mr. O’Grady, who sipped from a flask between classes and had a penchant for Korean girls; Mr. Tortolano, my English teacher, who, rumor had it, was an upstanding member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association; and Mr. Flag. Oh, Mr. Flag. Joe Randazzo, who sat next to me in history, circulated a drawing of Mr. Flag, appropriately named, his stiff facial expressions explained by a large flagpole up his rear end.
    I couldn’t imagine myself back in the classroom beside Melody and Joe and Petrosky and Flag. I hadn’t exactly found my crowd at the Bronx High School of Science yet. Just girls like Eva Friedman and Lana Hernandez, who I hung out with at lunch and rode the train home with. I was waiting for a real best friend, someone who’d come into my life and share all my secrets, someone I could tell everything to, the way I used to with Lucy Gluckman. After the funeral, Eva’s and Lana’s eyes had searched me with a horrified fascination, as if my mother’s death might show physically, like a huge wart or missing limb. “Uh, sorry,” Eva had said. Not that I knew what to say either. What could I say? New boughs are growing. Memories are bringing me peace.
    â€œYou’ll feel better once things are normal